Journalism

The Sharehood is a new local community cooperative initiative that is all about sharing resources within your neighbourhood. Sewing machines, cars, tools, books and washing machines all have the capacity to be shared. Skills too are meant to be shared, gardening help, handiwork, bike fixing, accountancy and so on, are all both desired and available within your neighbourhood.

Last night was a quiet one in Jabbaliya. ‘Only’ six homes bombed into the ground, the Market, again, maybe four lightly injured people – shrapnel to the face injuries – and no martyrs. Beit Hanoun saw a young woman, Nariman Ahmad Abu Owder, just 17, shot dead as she made tea in her family’s kitchen. It was 9pm in the Hay Amel area when witnesses reported ‘thousands’ of bullets shot by tanks onto homes in Azrah Street.We got a call to go to Tel Al Zater looking for the dead and injured, around 2am. ‘This area is dangerous, very very dangerous’, warned one volunteer rescuer Mohammad al Sharif as our ambulance bumped along sandy, lumpy ground, lighting up piles of burning rubbish, stray cats, political graffiti, and the ubiquitous strung out coloured sack cloth and stripy material in large thin squares, tenting the pavements. What is it? Protection, I am told, so that the surveillanceplanes won’t see the fighters. Palestinian body armour.

Mohammad, and Ahmad Abu Foul, a Civil Defence medical services co-ordinator told me they had been shot at by Israeli snipers yesterday. Mohammd had recounted the story, still counting his blessings, earlier on at the ambulance station. They’d gone hurtling over graves and tombstones to fetch casualties when Israeli snipers opened fire. They’d laid down flat on the ground until the firing stopped. Ahmad, 24, another rescuer here, told me he had been shot in the chest – inhis bullet proof vest – close to the Atarturah area whilst trying to evacuate corpses three days ago. His brother, he had told me, had been injured 14 times working as a paramedic. ‘14 times. Then he got hit by an Apache. Then it was serious. That took him out of work for a few months’, he explained.

Back to Tel Al Zater, we searched with micro torches, sweeping over slabs of broken homes and free running water from freshly smashed pipes. A black goat was trapped in a rubble nest. We stepped over broken blown in metal doors off their hinges. Nothing, noone, ‘snipers’, on our minds. We ended up leaving with one casualty, lightly injured, more in shock that anything else. Explosions continued through the night. Abrupt slumps into concrete echoing around the hospital, like rapid beats to a taut drum skin.

This morning was a different story. I’ve been finding that the most missile-heavy times seem to be between 7-9am. I counted 20 strikes in those two hours this morning. I’d come to Mohammad’s house. He went straight to bed, exhausted. Id caught some sleep spread across the front seats of the rickety ambulance, waking up periodically to respond to calls. At Mohammad’s I did some badly overdue washing and went towards the roof with it. ‘Ewa, do you want to martyr yourself?’ said Sousou, Mohammd’s 19 year old sister, a bright sciences student unable to finish her studies due to her university – the Islamic University – having been bombed last week. Hanging out washing on the roof here is a potential act of suicide – there are stories of people having been shot dead on rooftops. Walking down the street to buy bread, also a potential act of suicide. Visiting family, going to the market, drinking tea in your own home – a potential act of suicide? In the end I do go up, with 9 year old plucky Afnan, who hands me pegs nervously as we scan the skies periodically, while the murderous sneer of Israeli surveillance drones leers above us.

On the morning of Friday 21st of November, a peaceful action by conservationists in the Upper Florentine was targeted by violent logging contractors, with one activist kicked in the head and blockade infrastructure attacked with a sledgehammer, seriously endangering two activists . This occurred while a Forestry Tasmania employee watched on.

Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end.

If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's New York Times.

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Although my book on prophecy and the Mayan Calendar is behind me, I am still approached all the time by people in search of the meaning of the encroaching end date of December 21, 2012. “Is it the end of the world?” reporters ask me on television. In emails, I am begged for advice on matters ranging from shamanic ritual to retirement funds, from dealing with extraterrestrials to seeking a safe place to hide out from polar shifts, earthquakes and super storms. Meanwhile, academics and self-taught experts send me their pet theories on tribal prophecies, astrological conjunctions, UFOs, Egyptian gods, quantum consciousness, Illuminati conspiracies, free energy technologies and much more.

As the US Election draws to a close, the rest of the world has to just watch and wait as the self described "Greatest Democracy On Earth" continues to be one of the worst representatives of the democratic process of all western nations - although it does create fantastic political theatre... With the global economy in freefall, Republican Party (or GOP as they like to call it there - "Good Old Party", seriously), candidate John McCain has spent the last few weeks of the campaign trying to talk about anything else. They've linked Obama to Bill Ayers of the radical left wing group The Weather Underground from the 60's in millions of dollars of paid advertisment (actually I highly recommend the documentary about them which came out a few years ago to understand where they actually came from and what they represented). Although Obama was eight years old when all this took place it was enough for them to try and pin the dirtiest word in America on him; terrorist, and apparently this was shouted out at various Republican campaign rallys. They've compared Obama to a pop star (Paris Hilton and Britney Spears to be exact). He's been called a socialist by the "pitbull with lipstick" Palin (her words) and McCain having said what I think is one of the worst quotes of the entire campaign; "America didn't become the most powerful nation on earth from spreading the wealth around...". Oh really...